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Friday, October 22, 2010

Most people often asked me to tell them what's the easiest business you can start and make money online. This has not always been an easy question to answer, and although I have always advised people to go with your passion, l have noticed that I am not giving the best advice. There surely must be a type of online business that even a beginner can start and start making money from it. After careful reflection, I pretty much concluded that affiliate marketing is the easiest way you can start business and be your own boss in less than a year, if ofcourse you're willing to work.

In this article, I look closely at the business of affiliate marketing and why this business easier and more profitable than any business you can start online.

Affiliate marketing is representing merchants as a sales associate and compensation comes in the form of commission. It's as simple as that. From the day that Amazon started its affiliate program first, almost all commercial establishments have started one. This has given online entrepreneurs several sources of potential income and many have benefited.

So why is the affiliate marketing business easier and more profitable than any you can start online?

To start, an affiliate marketing company don't have the greatest risks associated with the development and launch of your own product. The failure rate of new products both online and offline is incredible. In fact, the development of new products, there are more failures than successes with the successes being incredibly rare

Not only that, the development of new products is very costly and time consuming. Now, most entrepreneurs do not have much money to waste on the experiments whose outcomes have a higher probability of failure. In fact, most entrepreneurs start their businesses online and part-time operations, and then develops from there.

The biggest advantage of affiliate marketing which actually makes the business easier to start is that youre just plugging into an already successful product or service. You do not have to worry about product development and which is taken care of for you by the merchant. With the product at hand, all you have to do is develop sales and you're in cash.

It's as easy as that!

In fact, one might go so far as to say that unless you can create an affiliate marketing business successfully, it will be useless to try his hand in the development of new products.

The other key advantage for affiliate marketing is that the commissions are very good. In the old days, with affiliate marketing, commissions have been around 5 percent per sale. This has improved dramatically since then. Most merchants offer commission found in the region of 30 percent to 75 percent of the purchase price. The average is around 50 percent. So, you see, you can easily earn 50 percent of what you never worked to produce in the first place. All you need is the ability to produce online sales.

If you have made an effort to select the affiliate program right, you should be making substantial sums of money in no time. The number one mistake most people who are targeted by programs that pay lets say $3 commission per sale. That means you make 333 Sales for only $ 1.000. However say you're promoting a product that sells for $100, 10 sales will get you the same numbers!

unfortunately this can be true IF you work with an offer directly (ie through their site alone), if you make sure you work with something that appears pretty respectable (a good sign is they have an affiliate section on their site with plenty of tools to help you), you probably won't get screwed. however pretty obvious how they could steal your sales because well its just them 'citing' their data of your affiliate link details (number of clicks etc.) however if you work through a third party like Clickbank then there's no way that can happen as click bank is the neutral middle party moderator citing THEIR data; they will ensure you are infact credited for each sale YOU make.